http://www.televen.com/noticias.htm
http://webapps.d.umn.edu/cgi-bin/etc/webx/WebX
First use - research, primary sources; problems of text costs, reading on computer
Second use - e-mail with students abroad; goals; work/coordination needed; mixed results
Third use - web pages; course info on-line, plus links; use by anyone
Further use - getting to know all the possibilities, and selecting those which enhance learning
This year
Next - scanning graphics
I've been using the internet for some time now for students to do research out of class, for discussion purposes in class. This reading can be primary sources--poetry, drama texts--or secondary, such as web sites with historical information. The availability grows constantly, expanding what we can give students in any given semester, and it overcomes the cost limitations which underlie our text selections for courses. (There is, of course, the cost of printing, for those students who prefer to print and then read.)
I've also been able to use e-mail between my students and target-language speakers from other parts of the world. Thus, in Advanced Spanish one year, I had students paired up with Mexican partners, and each was to "dialog" in writing about specific topics. The goals were to 1) increase students' ability to read and write in Spanish, 2) increase students' active and receptive vocabulary, 3) give students the opportunity to delve into culture first-hand, through personal contacts, and 4) provide students the opportunity to perhaps make possible life-time friends. The reality, of course, is that such an arrangement needs careful planning and monitoring by faculty on both ends, so that students actually do their assignments in a timely fashion. For some students it worked well, for others it never worked; for the majority it worked to an extent. Monitoring and setting up the pairings and the technical aspects took a fair amount of time, but I do believe it is worth it, if for no other reason than the personal contact.
What I have learned to do since Fall 2000 is first of all use Adobe Page Mill to create a web page and to put course information and other relevant material on the web (<<http://www.d.umn.edu/~ezeitz/>>). For that, I owe Helen Rallis a very large thank you. This page gives instant access to students and others around the world to the information contained within. For example, this semester I had an inquiry from someone in the Netherlands about my grammar exercises connected to my web page.
This year I have been really fortunate to have Bruce Reeves tutoring me on what technology possibilities exist, how to select from among them, how to best present them, and how to actually operate the technology. More and more I find myself assigning readings on the web, in place of or in addition to the texts students purchase.
There are four experiments I would like to share. In Advanced Spanish and in Hispanic American Civilization and Culture I assign students to read newspapers, watch television, and listen to radio from the Spanish-speaking world. This takes a large amount of time to find what is available, what works easily for students and techno-phobes like me, and what provides the best material for students. I have created lists of links to facilitate students' search when the assignment is broad, such as to read any newspaper and summarize any one article.
One radio station in Uruguay allows students to read or listen to the news broadcast, and Bruce showed me how to use the equipment do both at once. One would prefer that students not read--after all, they can't "read" the radio while they are living abroad and listening--but for language learners, the reading can prove beneficial and often necessary. Now that the station has changed its format, we have to do a few more steps to hear the programs, but Bruce has been able to teach me the steps needed. So, once at the site <<http://www.espectador.com/>>, one clicks on, for example, news in the archives, clicks on the symbol to listen, copies the url, calls up Real Player, opens File Open Location and pastes in the copied url, hits ok, and listens. If I want, I can go back to the page with the list of news stories and click on the broadcast and read along. The goals for this task are short-term and long-term. I want students to hear and become used to different or specific accents; I want students to learn about current events in the Spanish-speaking world; and ultimately, I want students to be able to understand what they hear--and newscasts, with their rapid-fire speech, are good training--wherever the students might be.
(For television, for example, students can watch the following: <<http://www.televen.com/noticias.htm>>, which takes a bit longer as it downloads. And for newspapers, one can read El País, from Spain, perhaps the best paper in the entire Spanish-speaking world: <<http://www.elpais.es/>>.)
While the instructions may sound complicated, I have learned that if Zeitz can do it, just about anyone can. This does take time up front, and often the sites change and even disappear. You do have to be selective and find ways to make it easy for students, and I believe that the technology must serve to further education. For my purposes, the news stories provide a large variety of current stories that will appeal in some form to all students, and they expose students to language and culture in a very immediate fashion. Using these sources, students can practice all four modalities involved in language learning: listening and reading comprehension, and speech and writing production.
This leads to the two ventures for this year: web drop and web discussions. For web drop, with the assistance of Bruce Reeves and Barb Johnson, the students are learning to send their news summaries to me through web drop. This allows me to collect students' work all in one place, and for the diachritics to not get lost as they do when you paste into an e-mail. I then have everything together, not interspersed with other correspondence, and I can quickly read and evaluate the assignments. While I originally intended to not make corrections on these news summaries, my next goal is to learn how to make corrections and return work to students, all without having to use paper. This might prove faster or cheaper than through traditional ways; certainly it will be easier for students to read my comments and corrections, since my handwriting leaves something to be desired. I don't know if I would want to use web drop for long papers, since I'm one of those who likes to read off of paper. But for now I am experimenting with the technique.
With Bruce's help, I am using web discussion all year: <<http://webapps.d.umn.edu/cgi-bin/etc/webx/WebX>>. For Advanced Spanish, I set up a folder and students did three assignments, each of which had two stages. (I should admit that I'm still not proficient at setting up the folders, but I'll get there.) In the last assignment, students first responded to my statement about the novel we had just finished reading in class, and then they each had to respond to another student's remarks. I had intended this assignment to further the students' writing skills. Unfortunately, what I found was that the writing was still as error-laden as at the start of the course. What did improve was the quality of the comments, although that might have been a function of the structure of the question, vis-a-vis the other questions for the previous two assignments. So again, I'm going to try it this semester, building in more feedback about students' writing and paying particular attention to the questions I formulate.
After this I want to learn to scan in graphics and to make them "readable". I imagine using this technology in particular to have art works readily available to multiple students, for oral and written discussion and commentary. Or, for example, last Friday I would have liked to have had available for showing on a screen a sketch I had of an Argentine slaughterhouse, so students would better imagine the setting for the story they were reading. Instead, I resorted to some xeroxes, which worked, but because of cost, I didn't have enough for everyone to view simultaneously.
Finaly, I would note that the student surveys from last semester seemed to indicate that while for the most part students had little difficulty handling the mechanics of working electronically, they would have preferred to have the courses less dependent on technology. So does this mean that what seems exciting and useful will prove to be as disliked as power point presentations? At this point I hope not, and that means I've come a long way.